"I was approached by a Ku Klux Klan member in 1980. I was six years old, walking up Main Street in Westminster, MD, with my family. The man wasn’t wearing a hood or a uniform. He looked nice enough, so when he stooped low and handed me a pamphlet I smiled back and accepted it. I had never seen my father yell at a stranger in public before, but in a split second he had ripped the paper out of my hands and threw it on the ground. I was horrified and embarrassed to see my father threaten another man in public. I had no idea what was going on. This memory stayed with me because of its ugly strangeness, but until I visited Rewind, Paul Rucker’s new exhibit at Creative Alliance, I had not considered its significance. As a white person from a middle class Maryland home, the world I grew up in was mostly egalitarian, progressive, and kind. Rucker’s work made me reconsider a shared past from the perspective of the black people living in my town, and it was shocking for me to realize that their...
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- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet

"The cape the saint wears was once a deep, vivid red – a symbol of generosity for medieval Christians, and a reminder of the blood shed by Christ on the cross – but for centuries it has been the drab colour of stone. Now, more than 600 years after it was carved for the 12th-century Norton Priory near Runcorn in Cheshire, the symbolism of the magnificent medieval statue of Saint Christopher is to come alive again. Using an innovative lighting technique, projectors will recreate the vibrant painted colours that once covered the stone, showing the saint as medieval worshippers once saw him. The new technique, pioneered at Amiens cathedral in northern France, restores the full palette of colours to one of the finest works of its type ever produced in Britain. After dark throughout this past summer, the saints, apostles and other figures that are carved into the western front of the cathedral, which is a Unesco world heritage site, were seen in their original glowing colours. John Larson,...
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- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet

Gotta project Potato Jesus up there as a joke one time.
- Andrew C (✔)

I find it interesting that history lost track of the coloring of Greek & Roman statues as well as medieval cathedrals, it seems. So later generations developed a "classic" aesthetic that was of white/grey marble. Focused only on the form, not colors. And that reads to us as "classic" whereas coloring one's statue replicas now would seem gauche.
- Spidra Webster

" Carob wood, oil finish 8"h x 7.5"dia. Turned, carved, pierced and textured About the wood: Carob, a tree from the Mediterranean region, is an exotic species introduced into Arizona as a landscape tree. The wood generally is not available commercially and can only be obtained when a tree is cut down and destined for the landfill or firewood lot. The wood is very heavy, hard and very colorful."
- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet

"At the end of the 19th Century British troops looted thousands of works of art from the Benin Empire - in modern-day Nigeria - and brought them home. One soldier's grandson inherited two bronzes but recently returned them to their original home. "It's an image that's deeply ingrained in my memory. The dead body seemed unreal. It's not a picture you can easily forget," says Mark Walker. He was 12 years old when he first saw his grandfather's diary - the photographs inside made a deep impression. "They were very faded, but perhaps the most shocking one for me was a partly dried-up body being held up by two men on a pole. "Clearly the people lifting the body didn't actually want to touch it and that seemed to me to capture the feeling my grandfather also had about them. It was something so horrible you wanted to keep it at arm's length," says Mark. The pictures were taken by his grandfather, Capt Herbert Walker, in West Africa in 1897. The two Walkers never met - Herbert died in 1932,...
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- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet

"Philippines-based illustrator Kerby Rosanes is back with more of his amazing black ink doodles. Drawn in his trusty Moleskine, his new works feature various pop-culture characters such as Loki, The Joker, and Venom—as well as wild animals like a sabretooth tiger, a fox, and an owl."
- Mark H
from Bookmarklet

"Among the plethora of promotional material created by 20th Century Fox for the original 1968 Planet Of The Apes were these two-color "door panel" posters for theaters, introducing various characters from the film. This kind of giant poster was fairly prevalent in the 60s (I've seen similar ones for the Bond films and other flicks), but became less common in the 70s as studios continued to cut costs on this kind of promotion."
- Mark H
from Bookmarklet

"How do Benedikt Gross and Joey Lee spell “success”? The S is a curvy rooftop in Munich, the U a building in Chicago, the C a parking lot near Los Angeles, and the E a complex in Basel—all drawn from their quirky new alphabet, the first comprehensive effort to catalog as many as possible Roman letterforms scattered across the world’s surface as seen from above. Gross, a designer in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lee, a geographer and native San Franciscan studying in Vancouver, are poring through databases of public and private satellite imagery, wielding algorithms they’ve developed to recognize letters. One result of their virtual prospecting will be a new typeface, with each character digitally generated from select letterforms they’ve found so far. The duo call it Aerial Bold (a play on the popular Arial font); they plan to complete it this year and make it available free online. Does the world need another font? Of course not, which is why this massive feat of data-crunching and...
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- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet

"Book historians tend to compare features of the medieval book to body parts. Thus the manuscript’s “head” (top edge) is connected to its “spine” (the back) via the “shoulder” (the area where board meets spine). There are even terms that compare a medieval book’s physical features to human activities or conditions. A large letter with a lively figure inside is called a “gymnastic initial”, while line ruling that is nearly invisible is “blind”. I could go on and explain how other, seemingly unrelated, objects have been used in bookish terminology (the “diaper pattern” is my favourite), but you get my drift. This post takes this projection phenomenon a step further. It shows how one particular feature of the medieval binding eerily resembles a body part, not just in appearance but even in function: the clasp (Fig. 1). Arm and hand Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, BPL MS 2579 (15th century)Fig. 1 – Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, BPL MS 2579 (15th century) – Photo EK Medieval makers...
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- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet

"Eye Heart Spleen is a series of photographs shot by artist Camila Carlow. Born in Guatemala and now residing in Bristol, England, Carlow has rendered some of the most recognizable and crucial parts of the human anatomy using local plants and weeds. Her hope is to draw attention to the way in which our bodies are their own complex, living ecosystems, much like the environment outside us. I’ve written previously about how clever I think it is drawing parallels between human and botanical sexuality. We don’t think of plants as sexual organisms, but in fact the parts about them we often appreciate most – their flowers and fruit – could be considered plant genitalia. Which is why I love that Camila has used flower blossoms, for example, to represent nipples, and apples to represent gonads. Because what most people don’t realize when they take a bit of a juicy piece of fruit is that what they’re sinking their teeth into is a nice, engorged plant ovary. Yummy, right? Organs created from...
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- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet

"In 1955, a Russian émigré died alone, unknown and in poverty at the hôpital de Lagny to the north of Paris. After leading a hermit's existence in his small room at the hotel de la Rochefoucault in Paris, this former Russian aristocrat had created a fascinating body of work which, deemed eccentric and worthless, was locked away in storage and forgotten. Throughout his solitary life, the artist had painted works that reflected his various obsessions with martyrdom, asceticism, decadence, spirituality and sexuality. Executed in a style marked by the Russian art nouveau, his imagery nevertheless transcended this movement, bearing undeniable traces of demented vision, indeed, genius. "
- Spidra Webster

There are many more photos at the link but the page was behaving weirdly with the bookmarklet so I just used the one photo before any bugs could get me...
- Spidra Webster

"A sensuous Paul Gauguin painting of two Tahitian girls has been sold from a Swiss private collection for close to $300 million, one of the highest prices believed to have been paid for an artwork, according to European and American art world insiders with knowledge of the matter. The sale of the 1892 oil painting, “Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?),” was confirmed by the seller, Rudolf Staechelin, 62, a retired Sotheby’s executive living in Basel, Switzerland, who through a family trust owns more than 20 works in a valuable collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, including the Gauguin, which has been on loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel for nearly a half-century. Two dealers with knowledge of the matter, who declined to be named because of concerns over client confidentiality, said the painting had been purchased by a Qatari buyer, but Mr. Staechelin would not say whether the new owner was from Qatar, a tiny, oil-rich emirate. “I don’t deny it and I don’t confirm...
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- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet

"In 1916, the Doves Type was seemingly lost forever after it was thrown into the River Thames. Almost 100 years later, and after spending three years making a digital version, designer Robert Green has recovered 150 pieces from their watery grave... The Doves Type was commissioned by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson as a bespoke typeface for the Doves Press, the London printing company he co-founded with Emery Walker in 1900. A modern take on a Venetian serif, it took two years to create and was used in all of the Press’s publications, including books of verse by Shakespeare and Milton and the Doves Bible, which featured drop caps by Edward Johnstone. After falling out with Walker, however - their partnership was legally dissolved in 1909, after the business encountered financial troubles - Cobden-Sanderson spent nine months tipping 2,600lb of it into the Thames in secret, ensuring that if he couldn't use it, nor could anyone else. Disguised by darkness, he made around 170 trips to the...
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- Spidra Webster
from Bookmarklet